She unfurled the rope ladder for me. I climbed it and faced her. She looked at me and her eyes pulled down at the outside corners. "Pete," she said, "are you okay? You look terrible."
I tried to make a joke of it. I said, "You know, you're the second person who's told me that today."
Maggie didn't laugh, and I realized that it wasn't funny. Something let go around my solar plexus, and I felt that I could easily just sit down and cry. I did sit down, on a makeshift bench there in the cockpit, but instead of bawling I launched into a manic and probably none-too- clear account of all that had happened in the last day or so—in the time since Maggie had put her clothes back on and taken her much-desired self out of my backyard. I told her about my Jet Ski ride and the night aboard The Lucky Duck. About the rats in my pool and my most recent chat with Lydia. About my second sit-down with Mickey Veale.
At the end, Maggie blew out a long slow exhalation—what, in class, she called a cleansing breath. And that's when she said of course Veale was a liar. She said it with a matter-of-fact firmness that amazed me. The woman was a yoga teacher—spiritual, ethereal. And yet in that moment she seemed far tougher and more realistic than me. She'd embraced the simple, ugly truth that people lie, that lying was part of how the world proceeded. She said, "What's he going to do—say, Yeah, I'm a blackmailer? Yeah, I'm a smuggler? Yeah, I had those people killed?"
I blinked at her. She was backlit by the floodlights that were just coming on around the boatyard. Her short hair seemed downy in silhouette, but the outline of her shoulders and arms was very crisp and definite.
She said, "He's the one who had the rats thrown in your pool. Don't you think?"
"I don't know what I think."
She bit her upper lip, the nub of it I'd felt the time we kissed. Then she said, "We have to find out what he's smuggling."
It took a moment for this to register. Then I said, "We?"
"The Jet Skis—you said it was around four when they came around?"
"Maggie, listen—"
"I could borrow a skiff—"
"Forget about it, Maggie. I'm not getting you involved."
"I got you involved, remember?"
Weakly, I said, "Kenny Lukens got me involved. Besides, that's different."
"Why's it different, Pete? What's different about it?"
"Because it's my job to get involved," I said. I said it without taking time to think; I was shocked to hear the words come from my mouth. They hung a moment in the muggy air.
Maggie started in again. I'll borrow a skiff and a good pair of binoculars. We'll anchor near the gambling boat—"
"You borrow a skiff," I said. "I'll take it out and watch."
"I'm going too."
"No, you're not."
There was a standoff. In the midst of it we heard electricity buzzing in the nearby pylons, hulls chafing and squeaking against the wharves of Toxic Triangle. Stars got bolder as the gleam in the western sky finally gave up the ghost.
At last Maggie said, "I want to kiss you, Pete. Can I kiss you?"
Before I could answer, her lips were against mine, soft and parted and just slightly salty. I reached up and held her face. My palms cradled her cheeks, my fingers traced her jawline and the tender hollows beneath her ears. We ventured deeper into each other's mouths and at some point we were standing, pressed together at the thighs and the loins and the waist and the ribs. I felt the breath she pulled down deep into her belly. I felt the weight of her breasts as they squeezed against me, the moist and splendid channel between them. The kiss became a kind of trance, a small and perfect vacation, and in the midst of it I knew we would be lovers then and there, that we would waft down into Maggie's dollhouse of a cabin and find a cozy place to roll and join, to surge and sweat against each other as though on piles of hot leaves, to make the world stop if only for an hour.
Except it didn't happen.
Maggie pulled back from the kiss at last, her withdrawal slow but firm against the longing pressure of my arms. Our faces still close, she lifted an index finger and traced my lips. "There's a lot to do," she whispered.
I reached up and took her hand and nibbled the fleshy place beneath her thumb. "There's time," I whispered back.
She ignored that. "I've got to shower and change. Track down a skiff. Find binoculars. Can you meet me at the dinghy dock at midnight?"
I sighed and nodded, dreading another sleepless night out on the water. "But I'm going out there alone."
"We'll see."
"We won't see."
She shushed me with another kiss, a brief but fond and easy one such as longtime lovers give each other before climbing out of bed. Then she turned me by the shoulders, pointed me away from the salvation of her cabin and toward the rope ladder that overhung the transom.